Well I see it has been a while since I've done my last tech post. I guess with summer holidays, finally finishing off my masters, and finally getting our department's accreditation stuff out of the way, I really haven't spent a lot time on things tech.
However, I decided to experiment with distributing updated class material and lectures via RSS enclosures. I'm kind of excited about being able to use this technology and look forward to some feedback from my students. RSS is definitely the way of the future. I think I heard someone mention that Microsoft is going to be betting heavily on RSS in the next revision of Windows, now called windows vista, which is a real vindication of the technology. I think the key point here is that RSS is not about news, blogs and podcasting, but about distributing and subscribing to content.
As result you are seeing RSS aggregators move out of the world of just news aggregators or podcast catchers, and into becoming full boar multimedia RSS clients. Two applications I'm currently playing with are IpodderX and FireAnt, both of which provide an OK interface to Audio/Video/Text RSS content. They aren't designed for any particular type of content and so allow you to see any type of attachment a feed might have; ie. not just audio or text. Although when designing the web page for my class I thought I would use feedburner to take the ATOM feed generated by Blogger and convert it to RSS2.0. However, after reading the support forum at feedburner it looked as though they really only supported audio content. But I did a bit more reading and discovered that you can simply insert the "rel" reference in the "a" tag of your post and feedburner will create an enclosure out of any type of file. Of course any subscription to your feed will therefore use the feedburner feed. The other cool thing about using feedburner is that I can check out stats for the feed and see just how many people are actually using it.
Another site, or I guess RSS feed, that I monitor quite heavily is Digg. It seems to have just an awesome amount of cool tidbits about all types of technology. In fact I think it is fast outdoing Slashdot as a major source of interesting links and information.
